Picking startups: humans versus software

In February, for one of those features we’ve been running to celebrate 144 years of the Chronicle, we asked you to send us your best ideas for startups.

The prize was to get your pitch evaluated by a venture capitalist and printed in the paper — a shot at a little fame, if not money.

Your response was enthusiastic — you sent nearly 300 pitches. We only had room for a dozen, but we picked them — which was hard — and gave them to the VCs, who disagreed with our choices three quarters of the time. Of the 12 ideas the Chronicle printed, the VCs thought that nine of them, for business reasons, would not be good startups to back.

Here now is a third way to rank your pitches — with software, which disagrees with all of the humans involved in this project all the time, at least so far.

Most of your pitches were also sent to YouNoodle, a startup in San Francisco that ranks other startups through an algorithm that measures sources of funding, traffic to a startup’s Web site and “buzz” — the chatter that a company generates through Twitter, the blogosphere and the mainstream media.

Below is a list of the top 20 pitches ranked by YouNoodle early last week. None of the Chronicle’s or VCs’ choices are on this list, although YouNoodle’s score is a measure of “progress,” said Kirill Makharinsky, YouNoodle’s director of business development, not how promising or good a company might be.